The hacker spirit perseveres in all things, especially when it comes to squeezing every last compute cycle out of one's hardware. OC Team Italy set a new world record recently by overclocking a Pentium-4 processor core to 8.0GHz. The CPU they used in their grand experiment is a model 631, and runs natively at 3.0GHz. Their secret sauce to keep the unit from going Chernobyl? Liquid nitrogen.

On one hand, this horrifies the sysadmin in me. On the other.. rock the hell on. A round of beer's on me if I ever meet you guys face to face.